The Berlinale film festival in February opens the annual season in the winter cold of the German capital. Paparazzi stalk stars outside restaurants and hotels all looking for exclusive pictures. We concentrate more on the daily photo calls, press conferences and the red carpet premieres at the festival cinema. I have covered the festival nearly every year since 1991 and things have changed a lot in that time. Where there used to be only a couple of dozen of us at press conferences and premieres but today in the digital age there are at least 100 accredited photographers producing tens of thousands of images every day from the Berlinale.
Today, 17 February. at 15 hours Kosovo province unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia. It been ten years now since I wrote my “Diary of a Political Idiot,” a book that started with riots in Kosovo. Although I’ve tried to stop writing that book, I have never been allowed to. The Balkan disorder became the model of world disorder.
I can hear the voice of my dead mother, who passed away in 1999 after the NATO bombings, with her last words: “take care of Kosovo.” She didn’t mention her granddaughter, my daughter, whom she loved more than herself or me. She instead scolded me, the traitor, severely: Kosovo is not yours and you cannot give it away. You and your similar traitors don’t have pants on their asses and you are giving Kosovo, our heritage, away.
I remember covering a fire once and the home owner came over to me and a TV journalist and demanded that we leave and stop taking advantage of him. You will run into that. This man was very mad at us for just being there. We tried to explain our job but his emotion made him unreasonable. I had a friend who was attacked at the scene of a fatal accident when a family member literally assaulted him. Thankfully a deputy was nearby and came to his aide. I was shoved by a drunk and enraged family member while covering a house fire. I have been at other scenes when the family members were very accepting of my presence and understood what I was doing. There is just no way to predict how people will react under pressure.
Pointless job in a failing industry led by ignorant people with no creativity. And photographers, who are all stuck-up, selfish bitches who think they are better than everyone else.
Flipping through the latest issue of Vapors I came across this Lomo ad and it immediately made me smile. But as I was reading it, I noticed that this wasn’t just the regular old LC-A, this was the LC-A+, meaning they’ve made it better!
Back in the PCP days of the 1970’s, James Brown hosted his own television show. Future Shock was filmed in the pre TBS studios of WTCG in Atlanta. It could have been lost forever, but a few episodes managed to slip out of the vaults.
As C4’s Skins returns to kickstart a new age of fast, furious teen drama, we asked a panel of young people to watch the latest shows and compare fiction to reality
“This is a photograph that everybody is familiar with. When I first saw it, my eyes lit up: the Tibetan antelopes and the train on the Qinghai-Tibet railroad appeared simultaneously in the eye of the camera. This was such a precise and decisive moment! Thus, this photograph was selected as one of the top 10 most memorable photographs of 2006 and its author received innumerable honors … but on the day before yesterday, I suddenly discovered that there was a very obvious line at the bottom of the photograph.” On February 12, an essay titled Liu Weiqiang’s award winning photograph of the Tibetan antelopes is suspected of being fake was posted to the world’s largest Chinese-language photography forum Unlimited sights and colors. This post quickly drew more than 10,000 page views. As of 7pm last evening, there were 120,478 page views and 1,524 comments. Some netizens even compared Liu with “Tiger Zhou.” Could it be that this photograph was the result of PhotoShop manipulation?
The courts have not spoken directly on whether images on a website are considered “published” for copyright registration. It may depend on whether your photos are posted behind password protected pages and/or are for sale, but considering them as published is the safest way to register your photos.
“Stories are in search of tellers. And when a story grabs onto you, that’s the one you should be telling.” – Storyteller Alton Takiyama-Chung recites one of his favorite quotes.
Basically I start by making sure there is at least ONE usable picture. No risk taking… Autofocus, straight flash, no fancy composition, the accused smack in the middle of the frame, 5 or six shots. That’s it… Switch to the M8, ambient light (the last firmware update finally delivers acceptable white balance results), 320 ISO (too much noise higher up), 2.8, 30th/ second and MOVE, change position, go to the back of the pack, slide to the right, push back into the pack again, move back and go to the left where the judges are, go straight back towards the accused, frame, focus and… finished. It’s over. The 5 minutes are gone. We’re politely asked by the security guards to leave the room… Hoping we didn’t screw up and that there is something a little different to show. There are about 60 frames on my cards, 40 of which are really useless.
I spent two hours on a tour of the Sacramento County Jail today. They are beginning to open the facility up to public tours.
I’ve been in the booking areas before and I have had quick visits to different prisons. But here I had this intense feeling of solitude as I walked from floor to floor taking pictures.
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith has just been announced. I am currently experiencing a wide range of emotions about this, from pensive ambivalence to mild curiosity.
A 2007 print of Andreas Gursky’s photo “Pyongyang IV” sold for $1,375,000 at Sotheby’s in New York last night. Gursky’s huge, richly detailed, distorted-perspective prints are favorites among contemporary art collectors, and several of his works have sold for seven figures in recent years.
And everytime Madonna’s car stopped it would send photographers and cameramen into a frenzy – abandoning their vehicles on the roads and rushing towards her car with cameras hanging from their shoulders. It was surprising that no photographer got injured, either as a result of the crush or the baton-wielding policemen.
This time too, most of us had no choice. Either we follow her and get her pictures or not get pictures at all. And irrespective of the organisation we belonged to, considering this news-worthy ,we all followed her, though with varying degrees of intensity. It made by stomach churn, to see some enthusiastic bikers almost come in the way of Madonna’s speeding carcade.
British photographer Tim Hetherington talks about his photograph of a US soldier in Afghanistan which has won the 2007 World Press Photo Award.
The picture shows an American soldier in a bunker in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley during fierce fighting with the Taleban.
Andrew Hetherington is a top editorial photographer who lands commissions from magazines like GQ, ESPN and Details; and wins awards from CA, American Photography and PDN. Even though he spills his guts on his blog every week I thought you’d like to hear me ask him a few questions.
Olaf Blecker has antennae, but don’t think that makes him special. “I think everybody has these antennas. In German you would say, menschdenken, which is the knowledge of man.” He uses his powers to take breathtaking portraits for commercial shoots for AOL and Sony, among others. His editorial work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Details and Wired. Countless actors and models have found themselves opposite his lens.
